Page 11 of Serenity
The confidence she carried was in excess, spilling outward into every room around her. It summoned the eyes of every soul, every color, every gender. Captivation was Mya’s power.
Once upon a time, she exercised jurisdiction over my heart.
I met her at the Black Wall Street Convention in California. Dressed in one of those blazers altered to fit like a dress, her best asset was on full display. Legs. It should have been a red flag. The irony.
I approached as she sipped her drink, and Michael chatted her ears off. He introduced us. We did the formal dance of two strangers, conveying instant attraction. Mike stepped away, allowing me to get comfortable with her.
Immediate signs of their involvement failed to exist. Suspicion never surfaced concerning the pair. Michael was already married. And while well aware that hardly stopped a thing with niggas like him, as his best friend, I expected honesty. Even if he’d been having an affair, I expected he’d tell me to lay off his side bitch.
He didn’t.
Michael took a backseat in the cinema of our lives. He let me do the chasing, dating, courting, giving me advice for our first date down to the type of flowers Mya might like. He watched me swoon over her as our relationship bloomed like flowers in spring. When we talked marriage, he even advised me on the type of ring…
Twenty years.
Our friendship spanned a lifetime. Still, his actions reveal it was of little value. He’d thrown our friendship down the shitter for a taste of what was mine.
Line brother.
Best man at his nuptials and vice versa.
Right hand.
Second in command at the company I ran.
All of it dismantled for my wife.
Six years of marriage. Eight years of relentless romance.
We had a good life. Non-domestic trips every other month, companionship, communication, and commitment—I thought we’d nailed it. Thought we’d mastered marriage. Somewhere along that road, we failed. In trust and honesty, we failed miserably.
The sex was never lacking. When she cried boredom, I bought a swing. Ropes and chains all composed an arsenal of tools at her disposal. At her discretion always. Dick on demand.
She was a firecracker. Independent, spicy, full of passion, but those were just surface level to what was hidden beneath. A woman unaccustomed to being led, she couldn’t be told a thing. Couldn’t be guided. Couldn’t accept my gentle corrections. Too full of ego. Too many unhealed daddy wounds.
A person can be good for you but still not be good enough. In a desert, parched and thirsty for love, a person can come along and fill half that cup. And maybe, at that point, half a cup is good enough. But at some point, you’ll crave more. We all desire a full cup.
She’d partially filled my cup, as did I with hers, apparently.
The constants which had drawn me to Mya had caused our eventual demise. I craved a soft woman. A woman not blemished by her past. A woman who gave me space to hold her accountable the same way I’d do for her. A healed woman.
I gave her the best of me. A version of me I feared no woman might ever see again. In return, she gave no signs. No warnings. Never expressed discontent. Maybe it was because she was already wholly contented, fucking two dicks right under my nose. Maybe it was because she had the best of both worlds in two souls.
They’d been fucking. Long before he introduced us.
Duke, hold the fucking L.
After the divorce, she refused to drop my last name, speaking volumes to the quality of life I’d awarded her. Driver on standby twenty-four hours a day. A limitless allowance. A seven-room castle for us to fill with children. Access to my undivided attention regardless of how busy I was. The softest life a woman could ask for…
Mya admitted that her actions had no bearing on me or any failure on my part, but I still struggled to accept her truth. Accustomed to delegating my failures in life to my shoulders only, I sought the why in it all.
I had yet to discover it.
Thoroughly, I’d been invested in the success of my marriage. Difficulty was immense in comprehending why she’d chosen my best friend to violate the sacredness of our union. What I thought to be mine.
I entered the seven-bedroom, ten-bathroom mansion to hear my wife’s song of pleasure echoing through the halls, up the stairs, and in our bed. Colorful and vivid, it painted me the fucking heathen. The sight of my best man inside my wife stained me in ways one could never fathom. Her pleas for him to continue ravishing her in our bed were diabolical.
The scuffle between us as she cried for mercy—for his mercy…It was enough to disgust me from ever marrying again. The travesty of our lives lived in his every undeserved gasp for air. Despicable, it was. Michael was on his last breath when the cops arrived.